Red Bank Green

Serving Red Bank and Greater Red Bank, NJ

New Jersey’s largest daily is “losing a battle to survive,” its publisher says.

The Star-Ledger, New Jersey’s largest newspaper, has to shrink its payroll by 200 jobs and retool two union contracts by October 1 or it will have to be sold, the Newark-based paper reports its publisher told staffers today.

Amid an historic disruption in the newspaper industry as advertisers and readers flock to the web and cable TV for information, the newspaper is “on life support,” publisher George Arwady is reported to have told a stunned meeting of employees this morning.

A dead fish seen in the Navesink off Maple Avenue earlier this summer.

Today’s Press reports a trio of local fish kills, including one on the Navesink River between Maple Avenue and Riverside Gardens Park.

From the report:

About 50 to 70 dead adult menhaden, or bunker fish, were found dead in the Navesink River, another 40 at Parker’s Creek Wednesday and about 40 fish at Branchport Creek in Oceanport on Tuesday, said William Simmons, environmental health coordinator for the Monmouth County Health Department.

So far, health officials are saying there is no sign of disease in the fish, and they’ve taken water samples from the river, Simmons said.

Fulfilling the terms of a five-year-old deal with the borough government, the owner of the Red Bank Corporate Plaza will make the parking garage at the facility available to the public during off hours, for a fee.

The deal was formalized by the Red Bank council Monday night. Mack-Cali Corp. of Edison owns the site.

Though the lot won’t be open during regular business hours, Mayor Pasquale Menna said the move will open up about 150 parking spots “for what is a peak period” when the Count Basie Theatre holds major events.

He said theater patrons would be directed to the facility to reduce the number of cars trolling nearby residential neighborhoods in search of street parking.

A 31-year-old Bordentown vice principal has been hired as the new principal of the Markham Place School in Little Silver, today’s Press reports.

Dennis Morolda, who starts in the $108,000-a-year job on Friday, succeeds Don Merce, who was killed in a car accident in Oceanport in May.

From the report:

“One of my strengths, in my opinion, is being a motivational leader and building a community in a school, and I felt like I was able to do that in Bordentown,” Morolda said. “I figured that with the situation such that occurred in Little Silver, I would be a good person to come in and build the school back up from such a terrible situation.”

The 61-year-old Rumson resident faces 36 to 42 months in prison when he is sentenced by U.S. District Judge Anne Thompson on Oct. 10. Meantime, he remains free on a $1 million bond until sentencing.

From the article:

Police and federal agents had accused Eatough of using his offices in
Keansburg and Middletown to distribute opioid-based painkillers to drug
abusers under the guise of pain management.

While several of his patients described selling the medicines they were given
— prosecutors said one told a grand jury she made as much as $20,000 a week
distributing the drugs — others said Eatough was a savior who offered relief
from chronic pain.

The case plumbed the murky area of pain management, with experts on both sides
of the issue weighing in on whether or not Eatough’s actions had crossed legal
and ethical lines.

Eight to 10 social services organizations are expected to be present at a four-hour health fair scheduled for Saturday, August 9 on Red Bank’s West Side.

The Red Bank Family Support Center is organizing the open-air event in the parking lot of the Siena Grille at Shrewsbury Avenue and Herbert Street. The lot is opposite the RBFSC’s new offices at 140 Shrewsbury Avenue, and the occasion is a way to mark the grand opening, says Dr. Ana Monique Oesterheld, the center’s director.

She tells redbankgreen that the event is a “bare-bones” affair structured so that clients can walk through and see what services the borough and county have to officer in the way of healthcare and family and child-welfare programs.

Area residents came out in force July 9, when consultant Brian Valentino, left, described the preliminary findings of his police-consolidation analysis.

Round two of discussions about a proposal to merge the police departments of Fair Haven, Little Silver and Rumson has been scheduled for Aug. 18, Fair Haven Mayor Mike Halfacre reports on his blog today.

By that time, a consultant’s final report on the proposal should be complete and available for public review, writes Halfacre, who has pledged to make it widely available.

He writes:

This report is supposed to be available prior to the meeting, so that it can be debated on its merits, not on speculation of what it might or might not contain.

Hard copies will be available at borough hall, and Fair Haven will post the report on its website. Needless to say, redbankgreen plans to do the same.

First, a couple of non-surprises, as the Springsteen and Bon Jovi of the local restaurant scene  David Burke Fromagerie in Rumson and Nicholas in Middletown  are included in among the state’s 25 best, as rated by the magazine’s critics and dining editor. Both places are near shoo-ins on these sorts of rundowns.

Of bigtime chef David Burke‘s place, the magazine says (somewhat inscrutably, we must admit):

Once a bastion of Old World French cuisine, Fromagerie is now a stage for Burke’s whimsical design sense and imaginative food. Tongue on rye is deli, but tongue-in-cheek ascends to cuisine under Burke.

A bit of the usual mayhem as motorists try to cross Bridge Avenue this morning. Cabbie John O’Brien thinks the four-way stop is a “great idea.”

For many motorists, it’s right up there with the traffic circle on the dread scale: the four-way-stop intersection.

On paper, it seems simple: whichever car has been waiting longest goes next. But in practice, it’s can be another of those Darwinian tests in which the pragmatic, the cautious and the timid are thrust into the coliseum against the bold, the aggressive, and even the reckless.

Then there’s the opposite: the clash of the passives, in which indecision rules. “You go first.” “No, you.”

Red Bank is about to get a four-way at a major crossroad. And there may be more in the future.

As expected, the Red Bank Republican organization has nominated John Tyler of Leighton Avenue and two others for the borough council spot vacated by the resignation of John Curley two weeks ago.

The council, led 4-1 by Democrats in the interim, now has 15 days to choose from among the three.

Tyler’s inclusion on the list, with Steve Fitzpatrick and John Giannell, is unsurprising given that he’s already on the GOP council ticket with incumbent Grace Cangemi as the party seeks to hold onto to the little it’s got at the local level. They’ll face Dems Juanita Lewis and Ed Zipprich in November.

Tyler’s on the ticket because of his impressive first-time run for council last year, when he lost a squeaker to Kathleen Horgan.

Authorities say the man who was killed by a lightning strike on Sandy Hook Sunday was a 38-year-old Elizabeth resident.

Two others, women in their 30s whose identities have also not been disclosed, were injured by the strike. They were reported to be in stable condition last night at Jersey Shore Medical Center in Neptune, according to the Asbury Park Press.

Down in Cape May County, four people were hospitalized after three lightning strikes within an hour. Two of the victims were hit on a beach, one was on an amusement pier, and one was in a parking lot, the New York Times reports.

A total of 12 people were struck by lightning in the New York-New Jersey region, according to various reports.

IN ADDITION TO LARGE HAIL & DAMAGING WINDS.CONTINUOUS CLOUD TO
GROUND LIGHTNING IS OCCURRING WITH THIS STORM. MOVE INDOORS
IMMEDIATELY! LIGHTNING IS ONE OF NATURES NUMBER ONE KILLERS.
REMEMBER.IF YOU CAN HEAR THUNDER.YOU ARE CLOSE ENOUGH TO BE
STRUCK BY LIGHTNING.

Monmouth County and Sea Bright emergency personnel reported at 12:21p that three people were struck by lightning on Sandy Hook’s Beach B.

Emergency personnel from Highlands were reported at 12:45p to be enroute with two victims to Monmouth Medical Center in Long Branch. A third victim was being taken to Jersey Shore Medical Center in Neptune.

Bargain hunters went sniffing along Monmouth Street this morning. One woman brought her pooch, apparently to give the goods an expert sniff.

The streets of downtown Red Bank were thronged all day Friday, day one of the 54th annual Sidewalk Sale, bringing an increasingly rare note of optimism to the voices of retailers.

“It started early,” said Mike Bonney of Red Bank News, who was selling lots of cold drinks beneath a tent on Monmouth Street. “It’s nice to see so many people out.”

Retailers reported strong traffic and decent sales well into the evening. “It really picked up during the dinner hours,” said Ellen D’Amore of Soapmarket. One shopper who brought a baby stroller said she found the sidewalks hard to navigate because of the turnout.

Expectations are high for today, given another strong start this morning and a forecast for nice weather.

Sea Bright and other coastal areas could expect more scenes like this one, from tropical storm Ernesto in 2006, according to a report that also examines the economic wallop of rising seas.

The economic impacts of global warming on New Jersey could run to the tens of billions in coming decades, says a new report highlighted in today’s Star-Ledger.

From the Sledger:

A rapid rise in sea level, increased flooding and more frequent and more intense storms will damage the state’s coastal communities, including businesses, infrastructure and freshwater supplies, the Center for Integrative Environmental Research at the University of Maryland said.

The rising sea level also poses risks to coastal shipping, commercial fishing and tourism. New Jersey’s coastal communities generate 70 percent of the state’s total annual tourism dollars, according to the researchers, who also issued reports for seven other states.

The company that ran into trouble for the asphalt it laid along River Road in Fair Haven last year is in the news today in connection with former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s hooker.

Thomas J. “TJ” Earle, the vice president of Earle Cos. of Farmingdale, had the misfortune to arrive at and leave the Gramercy Park Hotel in Manhattan with call girl Ashley Dupré (nee Youmans) just as a pack of paparazzi was parked outside hoping for a glimpse of Lindsay Lohan, according to Fox News.

The pretty woman, 23, and 35-year-old Thomas J. “TJ” Earle were spied ducking into the Gramercy Park Hotel, where they rented a room Tuesday after a long day drinking, dining, shopping and snuggling together in limos around the Big Apple, sources told The Post.

The two then separately left the Gramercy the next afternoon, after spending much of 24 hours in each other’s company. They walked out of the hotel 10 minutes apart, seemingly to avoid being photographed together.

Forty years after Dieter Bornemann took his restaurant’s name from an epithet, he says it’s time to change both the name and the menu.

It’s not quite ‘auf wiedersehen.’ But the Little Kraut, Dieter Bornemann’s accolade-winning German restaurant next to the Red Bank train station, is swapping its lederhosen for cargo shorts.

Bornemann tells redbankgreen that he’s dropping the un-PC name for “Oak Bridge Tavern,” in recognition of its location at Oakland Street and Bridge Avenue. He’s also paring the increasingly archaic menu of bratwursts and knackwursts in favor of  let’s all say it together  organic.

Why? Because it’s time, he says.

The stolid Teutonic menu “has been declining for the last 10 years,” the garrulous Bornemann says in his heavily marbled accent. “All those old krauts are moving to Florida.”

There may not be many one-lane gravel roads in these here parts, but our picture of one last week proved that there are at least enough of them in one patch of Middletown to confuse some ‘Where’ fans.

A number of their guesses were in the right vicinity: Jenn Woods and Mayor John Ekdahl of Rumson took it to be Whipporwill Valley Road; Sue Noone, Christine Gavin and Anna Ott went for Browns Dock Road; and Mike McMahon opted incorrectly for nearby Hartshorne Woods.

William Crooks and Sandra Talarico covered their bases by calling it “the road that leads to Huber Woods.” But only Steven Mitchell and medic1876 correctly specified it as Bowne Road.

Steven went a step further, recognizing that the view was westward. Ah, yes, but what time was it taken?

Today’s Star-Ledger has an Associated Press story reporting that the folks at a marine animal advocacy group are getting anxious about a federal agency’s reluctance to tease our visiting dolphins out of the Navesink River and back out to their customary habitat, the Atlantic Ocean.

The story’s on the website of the Sledger’s sibling newspaper, the Jersey Journal.

It says, in part:

Robert Schoelkopf, director of the Marine Mammal Stranding Center, is worried that with every day that goes by, the dolphins are getting more comfortable in a place they cannot survive in for long.

Former Mayor Ben Nicosia was among the spotlight guests at a cocktail party Tuesday night at the Molly Pitcher Inn, where he and three other former Red Bank mayors  Dan O’Hern, Mike Arnone and Ed McKenna  were honored by Mayor Pasquale Menna.